This is the work blog for the KDE Visual Design Group a group of dedicated designers striving to improve community participation in design for KDE as well as design work in general for KDE applications and Plasma.

onsdag 26 mars 2014

"Monday" Report #8 - Homeward Bound Edition

In which I explain why I'm two days late, go through the quickest community round-up ever, talk about the Plasma Next theme and brag about the documentation work being done!

Me, three days without brushing my hair, playing Minecraft on the patio. You can't see it but about 400 meters outside the image to the right, there is a massive sandy beach. But on the other hand, there was a massive vein of iron to excavate so who cares? Also since this photo I've gotten a hair cut and trimmed the 'stasche a tad. Less trolldoll meets Pancho Villa.

So this monday report is two days late, I know. Yesterday was when I was leaving my vacation spot, a twelve hour process of moving things (including me) around the earth trying wildly not to go insane. Then I had the happy option of being able to hang-out with my husband without a mother and a mother-in-law in tow. I am now home and going through all the backlogs for the things I have to get done and the major thing to get done is the "monday" report.
I kept up for one week during my vacation but then my inate laziness set in and I stopped working to stroll in the sun, play Minecraft with my brother, his wife and my husband and walking my mums dog. Sorry.

Plenty of things have been happening in the forums where things like help with the Media Center is asked for, the Awesome Community Icon Theme is getting closer and closer to completion (Rock on David Wright!) and in general its getting to be too many threads for me to keep track on it (I am reading through them right now!). If you are a designer and you don't at least skim through them you should be ashamed of yourself. So much work by so many people. It's like an inverted Churchill quote.

But the Plasma Next work keeps going onwards too: a dark theme is slowly taking shape with the work of Marco Martin! And don't it look darn pretty!

There is also some awesome work being done on the Design Guidelines by Andrew Lake and work is going on to merge them nicely with the HIG's to create a nice one-stop place for all your guideline needs.
Andrew has also provided everyone with a GUI mockup toolkit which will be fun to play with. It's SVG's so you'll have to wait for PNG versions of them but it will come in the future (as you can understand I plan on doing just that but it will have to wait until everything else gets done first :))

I think dark theme should be used for some applications and the light theme for some or maybe popup dialogs can specifically use the dark theme.Don't leave it up to the user to change to the dark theme because 99% of the users never change the defaults

Dark looks good except for some obvious things that don't, like the white text box and black speaker icon over black background.I think it would also look better if the slider "knobs" was in greater contrast to the dark background.

Ah, dark themes. I tried one once. It was pretty terrible as it broke Firefox, LibreOffice and even Calligra Sheets. RKWard was hard to work with, too. So I don't want to try such things until the first two switch to a toolkit that is workable in that regard...